An UI showing both edit links all the time is a much better way to do it. I had the same discussion 20 years ago and as far as I know nothing has changed when it comes to hidden user interactions that suddenly (and with no explanation) changes the interaction and takes the user with surprise. Sorry but the UI as it is now in this regard is a complete failure. Looks cool but is BAD.
I would suggest that interaction intense actions like this in the future should be implemented without fancy animations, hidden information and changing interactions.
Another thing is that the community asks for some way to turn this off, while WMF that is supposed to support the community goes against the community. That is really BAD. If there are no real reasons to not support what the community asks for, then WMF should have a really really REALLY good reason for why t goes against the community. This should not be a discussion about technical feasibility, it should be a discussion about what the community wants.
I suggest that WMFs technical staff starts to listen more to the community in this kind of matters, they are the one that are going to use the features anyhow. The ongoing discussion now only alienates WMF from the community
There are good reasons why users want to turn off VE and the most important reason are not what most people in the thread seems to think. Users that have learned to use a crappy direct editing user interface tend to be faster on using that interface than more modern WYSIWYG editors. I tried to make a few test edits whit carefully planned actions and I could not edit as fast with VE as with the old crappy edit page. I think this is quite common. When editors tries to edit with the new editor they experience this and gets the feeling that VE itself is sluggish, but the real reason is that the user interactions slows down. The difference in editing speed i visible even at ordinary text with only minor wikicode, but as the amount of wikicode increases the diference grows.
I suggest that VE might be the first editing interface for new users, but experienced users should be able to chose the editing interface they are most comfortable with, not to say the one where they edit the fastest.
I think it would be sufficient to remove the animation from the edit bar, but for users that refuses to use VE completely it could be wise to provide an option for remove the links, otherwise this kind of functionality will be provided as a gadget.
jeblad
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 24 Jul 2013 07:35:02 +0200, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
This interaction was committed by a volunteer not on the VE team.[1][2] Ideally,VE would be good enough that we wouldn't need edit source links on sections at all. Personally I advocated for not including them by any method. However, people felt that it was important to give users a choice on section edit links, and that as opposed to a dropdown or simply displaying both links statically, using a progressive display was the more elegant way of showing both options. MatmaRex could not have been clearer about this on the patch.
Not true; the patch was rewritten by Trevor, and he's marked as the author. My version was showing both of the links all the time, with no animations, and I still think it's a better solution.
-- Matma Rex
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